Neither far out nor in deep

Spending time by the coast tends to put me in a reflective mood and I often find myself replaying the previous year’s events over in my mind. So while I was on vacation a few weeks ago, I found myself asking, how did we get to Library 2.0? Thus, I began to think about this post. The Library, as an institution, has touched its edge to the currents of a new technology. As a result, it’s spawned what seems to be a rather pronounced, and disruptive eddy in the course of events that is all-things-library. But, as with all eddys in a larger river, the edge is constantly shifting, temporary and insecure. And yes, libraries are feeling a little insecure, right now.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it? Insecurity? Severe cases can hinder and even cripple, but when you blend in other qualities, such as courage, vision, passion, and experimentation, the result can be something quite disruptive and impressive in its own right. What strikes me about the Library 2.0 movement is that it is born from, and exists in, a constant state of insecurity. The form it has taken, however, is far from insecure.

So what does that mean for Library 2.0, and why is it important? Insecurity is an indication of risk, which is something we should all tolerate a little of. There is no guarantee that the work we put in to adapting 2.0-related ideas will have a net positive effect on our organizations and so the willingness to experiment on our production environments becomes a necessary aspect of L2. That, of course, is terrifying.

So let’s take a look at exactly why L2 is so scary and try to deconstruct the rational from the irrational.

“Patron’s may complain” (see flickr complaints). Often times, we seem so afraid of risking a patron complaint that it keeps us from pursuing something potentially interesting. To some extent, I believe that patrons don’t have all the information to know what’s best for them. That’s what we’re there for–to create the services they never dreamed possible, right? At any rate, it’s impossible to please everyone, all the time. Yet, even if an experiment fails and ticks off a group of our patrons, isn’t that worth the right to experiment in the first place? I believe so. The government is not the only group of people who can inhibit innovation… our users can too. Keeping a vigilant eye on them may not be a bad idea (see Gwinnett CPL). I’m of the opinion that there is no moral equivalency between our mission and that of those groups that seek to ban “offensive material” and filter our Internet connections. They’re wrong, we’re right, period. Part of our mandate is to carry a community, even when a group of its citizens are acting like idiots.

“It may not work.” Well, of course it may not work, whatever it is. That’s the point of experimenting. And when it doesn’t work in a production environment, you may be embarrassed or even chastised–so what? Failures tend to tell us more about ourselves than our successes do. It’s quite possible that a miserable failure could lead to an even greater success. So analyze your failures, find out why you failed, where things went wrong, and what changes you can make. This is common sense, of course, but I think we tend to forget that the library environment is exactly the right place for experimenting because it is so forgiving. I think I’ve mentioned before that such an environment is our ace in the hole, as it were, with respect to our commercial competitors and our ILS partners/vendors. You will fail sometimes. Eventually, something you do will suck. Oh well. Get over it and try something else.

“Yikes, how do we keep up with our own growth?” If you have this problem, then you’re already the envy of other libraries and you’re finding little sympathy for this particular difficulty. Rapid growth of a service, while an indication of success, can be a major problem, especially if you’re not equipped to deal with it. Rapid growth can bite you in a number of unpleasant ways. First is the “victim-of-your-own-success” syndrome where you’ve created the impression in the minds of other departments that your department can create and deliver pretty much anything. As a result, the line, “Oh, we’ll just have [insert your department here] do it” becomes all-too-familiar. Of course you’re already up to your neck in projects.
Manage people’s expectations accordingly. The idea is to achieve superb customer service, but remember–that’s the journey, not where you are right now. If you allow people to expect a level of service you cannot reliably deliver, you are actually providing poor customer service and misrepresenting yourself in the process.
The other potential pitfall is that a service will outgrow the ability of its infrastructure to support it. You need to always think about extensibility–how to practically manage and accommodate growth. Don’t paint yourself into a corner. This could come in the form of outgrowing current server hardware, overwhelming staff with service requests, overtaxing existing collections, or something else equally vexing. Think about what success means to your organization in these practical terms.

Sustainability – Growth and sustainability go hand-in-hand. We ought to hone our soothsaying abilities enough to know what is sustainable and what is not. When we add a service, the worst thing we could do is to shut it off because we can no longer support it. That sets a bad precedence, and is not the type of expectation we want to foster in our users. How will they trust us enough to use new services if they’ve been burned in the past? Bear in mind, this is different from removing a service that doesn’t work well. I’m talking about removing a service because we can no longer support it, fiscally or otherwise. Evaluate your capacity to carry a new service indefinitely.

“What about outside factors?” Like.. well.. DOPA? There is no way to ensure that we’ll always have carte blanche to do what we want in the world. Take a moment, every now and then, to meditate on how blessed we are to live and operate in a free and open society. Then get real. There are certain things we cannot control, some things we can. DOPA is a great example of this because it’s clearly a highly political piece of poor legislation that is as unconstitutional as it is unenforceable. We’re also loosing the PR battle–I know this because I’ve heard, a number of talking heads on several different media outlets, complain about libraries supporting perverts and child porn. Yes, it made me angry, but pragmatically, it means we’re getting our hats handed to us. Clearly, this is an issue that our leadership is more equipped to handle on a federal level. Locally, however, are we doing anything to explain our position to our own users who may be hearing the same things? My point is that when outside pressure is applied against our organizations, we need to know our patrons will stand with us. Will yours?

FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It’s subversive, passive, and crippling. Remember SCO’s lawsuit against IBM over Linux? Well, everyone with a clue in the open source community knew it was bogus, but enough FUD was generated by the lawsuit that the growth and adoption of Linux decelerated significantly. When it comes to technology, I see similarities in the library world. Not necessarily due to someones lobbying efforts, but because a large number of our colleagues are very unsure about the impact of technology in our organizations. As a result, they feel threatened. It’s a gulf we need to span. Those of us who are more comfortable with technology know that most of those fears are unfounded–it’s our job to reach out and reassure our peers, to help them understand that while their role in a 2.0 world may be different, it’s no less important.
FUD can come from almost everywhere. It’s one of those things we need to be able to identify and stop before it gets out of control. It’s stopped by the absence of ego and the presence of cooperation, education and understanding.

We should relinquish central coordination?? – In some cases, you bet. Especially when it comes to adding social-based services. The term “Radical Trust” has been tossed about in regard to this. In order for some things to be successful, we’re going to have to let the reins slip a little (sometimes a lot) and let our users take over. Given our profession’s obsession with authoritativeness, it’s hard, I know. Get over it, and remember, authority and social participation are by no means mutually exclusive. The two can exist quite nicely in parallel.

So what happens if we don’t experiment? Well, being a father of three young kids, I tend to think of it this way: It’s 3 AM and your newborn has woken up with a particularly nasty diaper. You are really not in the mood to change it, but you think, “What will happen if I don’t change it?” Besides being neglectful of someone you love viscerally, you know the alternatives are not good. In other words, changing the diaper is the only option. Let your mind go down the path of complacency. Let it go waaay down that path–five, ten, thirty years. If you care about the wonderful institution you work in, you don’t need an answer to this question.

Hinchcliffe has a wonderful post describing the idea of viral feedback and network effects. He explains that the “physics of the web” have changed and evolved to the point where the game has changed, whether we like it or not. Every day, a higher proportion of our population begins to lead a life that has one foot in the physical word and the other online. In fact, I believe that the online world often allows people to express their true persona with fewer inhibitions than “real life”. Online interaction often closes the gap between minds–a phenomenon that can be mutually beneficial to libraries and patrons. But timing is critical: we need to be gearing up to enter into this game during its disruptive phase–not after.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Neither far out nor in deep,” an entry on blyberg.net

Comments are closed

A good post, but I do wonder: Who exactly was saying that Library 2.0 was “scary”? For that matter, who was saying that libraries shouldn’t innovate, experiment, take risks (within reason and local resources)?

Good question Walt, I think you’ll find plenty of hesitant folks if you tune in to that frequency. I remember an incident at IL05 where a woman stood up and stated categorically that she was not interested in learning new technologies at all. Walt, I think the people I’m talking about are the one’s we’re not hearing from.

Thanks. That’s an excellent and convincing response (and you’ll note that I did not suggest straw men). In looking for balance between hype/going off the deep end and basically ignoring the situation, I’ve forgotten that the true resisters won’t be found in the web world at all: They won’t be blogging, commenting on blogs, reading them, or (certainly) reading e-journals. (Actually, I’m astonished that someone that resistant to change would be at Internet Librarian!)

Which leads me to wonder just how you do get through to these folks–how you find out what’s really going on and whether there’s an answer. They’re not reading your posts…or mine.

Ha! Good point. I think those are the people that need the face-to-face interaction, which means, literally, talking to them about this stuff and, if you’re in a position to do so, create venues in which the discussion can come up at your own institution.

Events like Library Camp aim to do just this by bringing techies and non-techies together for discussions on a common goal.

I’m not going to suggest that the situation is easy to address, just that it really needs to be.

This is an excellent post with a great summation of Library 2.0. L2 is a very scary concept for many people in libraries – and in my day to day work, I experience a lot of resistance to L2 ideas. I’m really interested in trying to discover ways to help make the ideas of L2 (I generally leave out the “L2″ moniker because it really doesn’t mean anything to most library staff people) make sense to people – and your post is helping me formulate ways of dealing with overburdened and stressed library workers who just want to stop things from changing so rapidly.

Thanks for your post. It’s articulated much of what I’ve been feeling. When I think of insecurity, change and experimentation, I do so with excitement, but have a hard time telling other people why these things are GOOD.

To extend your metaphor….

Little babies come with no operating manual or guidelines. They are dependent on you to nurture and guide them. It’s useful to discuss with others how they coped with their kids, but ultimately there are so many differences that you have to wing it, try things out and make it up as you go along. And the stakes are HIGH if you get it wrong.

We used to have standard operating tools like LCSH or AACR#, which could be used with minimum adaptation in most libraries. There is now a much greater judgment call how we’ll adapt these new tools to our own patrons’ needs. Little comparison can be made between libraries. I think this is one of the most exciting aspects of Library 2.0 and a reason why we all need to talk, talk, talk to each other about what is happening in our libraries.

When I am sitting on the coast on vacation the LAST thing I am thinking about are libraries. :-) That issue aside, this was a very thoughful post which summarizes many of the issues which have been blogged over the last year regarding L2.

Librarianship seems to have a very strong culture of FUD that is handed down from generation to generation. It is not an new issue resulting from L2. Many of these arguments are the same ones we have heard over the past 30 years or so, since the advent of the online catalog.

As an Unfrozen Caveman Librarian might say, “Your world frightens and confuses me!”

[…] Insecurity, experimentation and change are GOOD for your library This post this morning, Neither far out nor in deep.at blyberg.net really caught my imagination. It discusses the insecurities brought on by the “Library2.0” technologies and what we may encounter as we ride the wave. Experimentation, sustainability, popularity of services, relinquishing control, coping with outside influences are all touched on. Articulates some of the things I’ve been feeling, but unable to put into words. An extract from the start of the post is below The Library, as an institution, has touched its edge to the currents of a new technology. As a result, it’s spawned what seems to be a rather pronounced, and disruptive eddy in the course of events that is all-things-library. But, as with all eddys in a larger river, the edge is constantly shifting, temporary and insecure. And yes, libraries are feeling a little insecure, right now. […]

[…] John talks a lot about Library 2.0 in his blog, especially in this posting: http://www.blyberg.net/2006/08/23/neither-far-out-nor-in-deep/ We’ll be really interested to keep up with what he’s up to, as our Project Team discusses how XC can include some of the features that John is exploring. […]